Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm surprised more ganking doesn't take place at the gates just outside of Jita. There are numerous times that ten to twenty freighters are bunched up at the gate into Jita.

The system might be a .8 but with enough ganker boats, maybe around 50, it would be easy to take out a freighter that is remaining idle on the gate.

Yes. And surrounded by .5 on all sides.

Do you believe that all traffic in new eden is between hubs?



No more so than a system where gankers can literally sit all day in two systems scanning everything that passes by for a ship that crosses some numerical threshold, like a crooked weigh station on the I-95.

I don't fly freighters. If I did, I WOULD be taking the 46 jump route.

I don't care about how hard life is or isn't on the freighter pilots.

What I'm going after is the crooked-weigh-station, fish-in-a-barrel aspect of it. Its too easy, and as a nullsec pilot that irritates me.

If CCP is going to force us to move less with jump fatigue, then they can do something force freighter gankers to move more.

70-80% of it. The rest is 70-80% nullsec traffic there is some being moved to poses but those already dont take a lot of .5s because you just do it where it's cheap.
with your proposal 90% of all traffic would never pass through .5 systems which is dumb and counters any risk -reward aspects of this game.

Its ridiculous that you can jump from trade hub 1 to trade hub 2 in ten jumps. While your ideas have merit the map is the problem. The hubs need to be farther apart with several 0.0 systems in the middle.

You should NEVER feel safe in a freighter. NEVER. I know I never feel safe in mine.

It wouldn't work that way.

The higher the sec status on a trade route, the more likely it is that people will increase the isk value of their loads, because higher sec status implies more "safety"; thus people plying those routes will continue to be profitable to gank despite the increase in sec status.

Concord response time in a 1.0 is approx 5-7 seconds, which is around 12-14 seconds faster than the response time in a 0.5 (19-21 seconds); ganking a ship in a 1.0 over doing it in a 0.5 is a simple matter of doing the math, you bring more DPS (either in terms of more powerful ships, or a larger fleet) to the party.

The only predictable results of the change that you suggest are that

• freighters will still get ganked
• people will continue to lose isk to the gankers
• people that get ganked will still cry on the forums about it
• anti ganking groups will still be ineffective
• gankers will still profit, despite having more expenses, because the people that they gank will continue to do the daft things that make it profitable to gank them

TL;DR CCP can't patch stupidity, it'll be business as usual for the gankers.

It comes from Red Frog Freight's Annual Report from 2015:

139,758 contracts completed, 382 failed. Total jumps completed: 1,883,479

Assuming the freighters never travel empty ever (ie. wouldn't be empty gank targets), then:

(382 contracts failed / 1883479 completed jumps) as a percentage = 0.0203% per jump average

(382 contracts failed / 139758 contract completed) as a percentage = 0.27% per journey, with each journey averaging 13.4 jumps

http://red-frog.org/annual-report-2015.php

It's not true that the freighters never travel empty, but this represents a worse case scenario for packages delivered through RFF contracts.

There have been excuses raised to dismiss the volume of freight moved by RFF as being not representative of the risk to any package in highsec, so take from it what you will, but the figure is an accurate conclusion from the data for RFF.

The fact also remains that there are no RFF Freighters. RFF contracts are moved by NPC Corp pilots and player Corp pilots in freighters that are totally indistinguishable from any other package or freighter during transport.

So the risk to RFF packages, measured with so many completed contracts (382 completed on average every single day of the year) is a good measure of the risk of being ganked in a freighter.

That is a kind of worst case figure also, as freighters do travel empty for some journeys and the 382 is failure by all modes (eg. overtime contract failed, theft, gank)

I'd say give bonuses that are specific to defensive ganking. Something like, once the freighter is attacked, the freighter receives defensive, drone, and jamming bonuses. Of course all freighters will then need mid slots, drone bandwidth, and a drone bay. What do you guys think? Cheers!

ITT: OP doesn't draw the parallels of freighters of space with cargo freighters of the seas.

Conceivably a freighter would have a security crew to prevent piracy and mutinies from proceeding, possess point defenses for the destruction of micro-asteroids and other potential wreckage that may impact the ship, possess a variety of other security features for other niche cases, but...

Frigates and destroyers are military vessels with (comparatively) reinforced shields and armour, they have systems devoted to weaponry, they do not launch boarding crews and they are not equipped to rob the ships they kill in any specific way. Freighters in EVE much like IRL merchant vessels would be woefully underequipped for fighting off any military aggressor trying to kill them. With redundant bulkheads and other practical defenses it would still be merely a matter of putting a couple of decent shots downfield to completely incapacitate a freighter, knocking out the conning tower or engines.

ITT: OP cannot into reasoning that just like IRL defenceless spaceships need to hire help.